Designer Diary 7: Ancient Forge Remastered | Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade

Read on to find out how community feedback helped shape Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade, and what you can expect in the Ancient Forge Upgrade Pack.

Free for Returning Backers — if you backed the previous Bardsung campaign, or the Bardsung pledge level from the Epic Encounters Kickstarter, you’ll get the Ancient Forge Remastered pack free with your pledge.

This pack will deliver a remastered Ancient Forge experience in line with Forsaken Glade.

Ancient Forge Remastered

by Sherwin Matthews

Welcome back, heroes! Having already blasted through exploration, combat, challenges, and both hero and enemy design, we thought we’d ask our awesome community what they wanted to hear about next.

The following designer diary covers the most popular request: the Ancient Forge Remastered!

The Legend of the Ancient Forge

For those new to Bardsung, the first release was Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge, announced back in 2020.

Legend of the Ancient Forge saw you descend into the ruined depths of an aged and reportedly haunted fortress, sunk into the ground centuries ago.

Sent to apprehend a band of hobgoblin brigands that had been raiding the surrounding villages, you also uncovered a multitude of other foes, and a far larger mystery than missing villagers.

Revisiting the Original Bardsung

If there’s one thing I’ve learned to appreciate in all of our communities, it’s the immense passion you all have for our games. It’s honestly humbling, and some of my fondest memories are of meeting fans from all over the world.

One of the most valuable parts of these discussions is feedback—what people liked, and what people struggled with.

Games are extremely subjective, and there’s no correct way to make them. What our internal team enjoyed might not resonate with the audience in the same way, and sometimes a concept doesn’t land the way we intended. That’s why when we create and release games, I always keep an open mind and listen to feedback both good and bad—it’s a valuable part of the design process.

Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge is no different. And with the release of Bardsung: Tale of the Forsaken Glade, our design team could consider the thoughts of the community along with our own when building upon the Bardsung engine, but we were also in the unique position of being able to revisit the Ancient Forge too.

The Ancient Forge Remastered is a kit designed to take in the key feedback we’ve received, and smooth out the experience of Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge.

And before I go any further, I’ll add that it will include replacement cards for the sixteen cards in the current errata, drawn from the Legend of the Ancient Forge core game, Fables, and Lost Levels expansions.

Updating the Rulebook Layout

The first stop is the new rulebook.

Rulebooks are fascinating beasts. People learn and interpret information in a variety of ways, which means whatever the game, one of our main challenges is determining how best to communicate information in the most user-friendly way.

For Legend of the Ancient Forge, we used an experiential layout that teaches you the rules you’ll need as you go, and builds on those foundations as you delve deeper. It’s a learn-as-you-play experience, similar to a video game tutorial.

While that worked very well in previous games (e.g. Resident Evil), feedback from Bardsung players told us a more conventional style would work better in this case. So, we’ve remastered the Ancient Forge rulebook to use a more conventional format, which we’re also using for Tale of the Forsaken Glade.

Next up, the adventure book!

Revising the Adventure Book

TL;DR? - There’s a new Adventure Book in town with a reduced number of encounters and greater enemy diversity, accompanied by a new set of corridor cards. And of course, we’ll go through and drop in any errata amendments, too.

Perhaps the most common piece of feedback we received regarding the Legend of the Ancient Forge was that some players found sessions to be quite attritional (or, to borrow a term from video game land, grindy).

Our team spent a lot of time on this, digging into what encouraged that experience. Once we’d found several different vectors, we put a lot of thought into how to address them for both the Legend of the Ancient Forge, and the Tale of the Forsaken Glade.

Let’s look at how we addressed that.

Let's Talk Chapters

The Ancient Forge is split into several chapters, each representing a unique area and point in the narrative. Each chapter contains a number of encounters which the heroes must complete in order to progress.

Whilst the majority of the early-mid chapters tend to be around four encounters long, others can be quite a lot longer. This can mean two things:

First, players may go several encounters without encountering meaningful narrative, to help steer them. Second, because enemies are set at chapter level, the heroes spend a lot of time facing the same combinations of foes.

The solution to both of these issues is to reduce the number of encounters you have to complete in order to pass through longer chapters, pulling the narrative elements closer together, and reducing the number of times you experience the same enemies.

More Enemy Variety

That brings me nicely onto the next point—enemy diversity. Having already explained the issue above, the simplest way to address this is to provide the solution, which is to move the enemy sets to an encounter level instead. I mentioned above that enemies used to be set at the chapter level. Now, the enemy sets are moved to an encounter level instead.

This means not only are there less encounters, but now each encounter can also have different enemies to further mix up the experience.

Balancing Combat Instances

In the Legend of the Ancient Forge, every tile you add to the playing area introduces either a challenge, or a combat. Whilst this is great for creating a sense of claustrophobia and the unexpected, it can lead to quite a lot of fighting.

In Tale of the Forsaken Glade, we’ve amended this by removing both challenges and combat from the trial tiles. Unsurprisingly this works very well with the Ancient Forge also, but to represent the plentiful traps in the Ancient Forge, we’ve left in a handful of challenge cards.

Crossover Monsters!

So, that’s how we’ve amended the experience of the Ancient Forge with the Remaster. But what about the miniatures between the two sets. Will there be any crossover?

If you guys hadn’t noticed yet, narrative is a big part of Bardsung. Every element attempts to tell a story, and draw the players into the role of heroes. Accordingly, choosing whether to add enemies from one core set to the other was a big decision, and one we wouldn’t take lightly.

Heroes were very simple. Because the heroes of Bardsung are archetypes, you’ll be seeing the same heroes already in the Forsaken Glade, with no need for crossover.

Enemies are a little more difficult.

Because the Forsaken Glade and Ancient Forge are such different locations, and the enemies encountered within each are tied into the narrative there’s not much room for crossover. On top of that, with each game designed as a standalone product, we didn’t want to end up forcing players to purchase both sets in order to play all the encounters.

Instead, we’ve created a selection of wandering monster cards for some of the enemies found within the Ancient Forge. This allows them to be encountered during specific encounters in the Forsaken Glade, without being too disruptive to the storytelling.

That’s all for this time—not long now left to go!

Come hang out Sherwin and the rest of the Steamforged team in the comments below, and on the SFG Discord here.

And if you’re not already following on Gamefound, make sure you do that now!